Feeding baby fish fry

Looking after and feeding baby fish Fry in your garden pond

Whether you planed it or not, if you have several fish in your pond chances are at some point you will end up with fish eggs in your pond, all ready to spawn into baby fish fry. At first I didn't know what these were but they kind of just look like frog spawn.

Food for the earliest stages

Once the fish eggs have spawned into baby fish fry they will live off their yolk-sac, for the first 3-5 days, but then they will be ready to eat. I believe there are specialist foods for feeding the smallest of fry, something called “Egglayer” but I don’t really no much about these as I went for the boiled egg trick. This is extremely easy to do and will only cost you the price of a boiled egg or 2. Simply get a small amount of boiled egg yolk and dissolve (shake vigorously) it in some pond water. You should end up with a test tube or small container of cloudy water. Add a few drops of this to your fry tank every day for the fish to feed from.

Food for slightly bigger fry

After a few days (weeks) the fry will start to get bigger and once again there are specialist live foods such as baby brine shrimp, vinegar eels and microworms, which if fed for the first few weeks are supposed to get them off to a better start in life. I personally just fed them finely crushed up fish pellets and were fine. The choice is yours!!

Summary

First 3-5 days they will live off there yolk-sac, then feed them crushed egg yolk dissolved in pond water until they are big enough to eat crush fish food pellets/flakes. Obviously if you were thinking of seriously breading fish you may need to look into feeding fry in a little more detail and purchasing more specific food but I was simply interested in seeing a few fish grow which had been born in my pond. As it turned out I have ended up with about 50 baby fish surviving in my pond (the pond at bottom of water fall without any adult fish) which received no special care from me what so ever (as I did not know they were there).